MS Office Simulation

Essential Grid simulates popular Microsoft applications. Users will find its interface to be friendly and familiar.

When a text length is greater than the cell width, cell contents can be made to float over adjacent empty cells simulating the Microsoft Excel appearance.

Floating cells is a power feature that is not commonly available in third party grid controls. The flexibility offered by floating cells, when formatting and entering data, provide additional advantage while using the GridControl.

Essential Grid supports accelerated scrolling, similar to Microsoft Office applications. Holding the scroll button down, generates accelerated scrolling. Users can also select cells and move to the edge of the control's scrollable area to scroll the grid.

The GridControl implements highly optimized scrolling, wherein scrolling speeds can be extremely fast on large data files.

Though the Intelli-mouse has been around for a while, it is quite uncommon to see applications and third party controls that support it.

Essential Grid, however, fully supports scrolling using the Intelli-mouse mouse wheel. Essential Grid also supports automatic scrolling when the user presses the mouse wheel and then drags the mouse, similar to Microsoft Excel.

Undo / Redo adds immeasurable value to the user interface of any application. The GridControl offers complete support for multilevel undo/redo operations. Any changes to the grid are saved in an undo list to perform subsequent undo/ redo operations, if needed.

Groups of such actions, referred to as transactions, can be rolled back in a single step.

Controls are usually tied to a Windows provided scrollbar for scrolling purposes. While this works well for most cases, there are use cases where this approach will not work. For example, in a workbook, controls will have to share a single scrollbar. This is not possible for controls that have their scrolling logic entwined with an intrinsic scrollbar.

Essential Grid is not directly tied to a Windows provided intrinsic scrollbar even though it fully supports it. Its scrolling implementation utilizes a different architecture that makes it fully independent of the intrinsic Windows scrollbar. Consequently, Essential Grid can be embedded in a tab / workbook and share scrollbars with other windows. It can also be hooked up to any independent scrollbar control.

Microsoft Excel is the most commonly used grid interface on the planet. Users have become familiar with it and rely on the powerful editing capabilities, it offers. A grid control that offers a standard Excel like interface will be readily usable by most Windows users.

Essential Grid supports complete Excel like behavior with full support for Undo / Redo, Excel like selection frame behavior and Excel like current cell behavior. There are other areas such as cell formatting, scrolling and shared scrollbar support, where Essential Grid closely mimics Excel like behavior.

RecordNavigation Control provides Microsoft Access like scrolling through records. The user can scroll by pressing arrow buttons or by entering the record number manually.

Microsoft Access users will feel right at home with Essential Grid.

Essential Grid supports a tabbed workbook format similar to Excel. Users may employ workbooks either in a form or MDIChild window.

Users have the option to display scroll tips when the user drags the scrollbar thumb.

The text in the scroll tip can be adjusted with events.

The grid can also be scrolled in real time while the user moves the thumb.

The GridControl offers complete support to perform clipboard operations with Excel, maintaining the formats.